My dad signed up for Prodigy in 1991 or 92. But I remember a friend telling me excitedly about "this thing called the World Wide Web - it's like the graphical portion of the internet." Except there were hardly any graphics in those days.
I also have very vivid memories of my Dad and I firing up Netscape for the first time and randomly clicking links until we landed on a French web page and we just looked at each other and asked "...did we just look at a web page from FRANCE????" Like we couldn't believe it was loading from so far away!
My dad signed up for Prodigy in 1991 or 92.
My dad signed up for AOL around the same time. I also tried a few dial-up BBSes that some other geeky kids at school said were good, but I never really got into any of them.
Man, we didn't have internet until ... 1998?
That's when I was telnetting to UNC from the Chico State computer lab to read Usenet. Ah, grad school.
I vividly remember a guy I went to college with saying without irony about a job interview (at Netscape, iirc) "They could go to my website and see a picture of my cat, so they knew I was serious". Images were still pretty exciting.
I have edged my front lawn AND swept up the clippings. And tacked up the roses that were starting to encroach on my neighbors yard. That may be it for today, it's getting hot.
In 1994, talk was the most exciting thing ever. I could type back and forth with my roommate, while she was still at work! Woot.
"They could go to my website and see a picture of my cat, so they knew I was serious"
Does that mean we can blame it all on him?
I'm sure he wouldn't mind.
I used tohave long conversations over talk with a friend/crush from high school who was up at Harvard, freshman year. He was homesick and few of his other friends had access to it.
First browser I used was a dev version of Mosaic, so that was what, 92? (Observatory was in a partnership with U. of Ill.)
I didn't get internet access until grad school, can't remember the exact date. I just remember that they installed ethernet cables in the uni housing and boom! There it was.